Jeff Rankin Product Designer

Projects / Weather Tools

A set of tools for NWS weather reporting and radar image compositing. These tools have been tested on Mac OS (with Homebrew or similar package manager for dependencies), Linux, and Cygwin. These scripts utilize services provided by the United States NWS, and can therefore only report weather for locations within the United States.

NWS Plain-text Forecast

A shell script that, given latitude and longitude, produces a plain-text weather report from the NWS. It uses the Lynx web browser in dump mode to retrieve the content as plain text. Some additional text processing is utilized to trim the top and bottom of the report.

NWS Radar Image Compositing

A shell script that, given radar ID, animation time period, and a time value after which old images are deleted ("never" can also be specified), outputs a radar image using the most recent image available and an animation for a duration up to (and including) the most recent image. It uses wget to retrieve the image layers and ImageMagick to produce the composite image and animation. I run it as a cron job every 10 minutes as below: